Passing The CCNA And CCNP: Cisco Home Lab FAQ by Chris Bryant
There is a real revolution today among CCNA and CCNP candidates. More and more of you are turning your back on "router simulators" and putting your own CCNA and/or CCNP Home Lab together, which is the best way to totally prepare to pass these tough Cisco exams. ... Start looking into used Cisco router vendors today (ebay is a great place to find some vendors, as is Google), and you can be practicing on REAL Cisco routers and switches soon - and be totally prepared for CCNA and CCNP exam success.

Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Route Summarization by Chris Bryant
Preparing to pass the CCNA exam and earn this important Cisco certification? Route summarization is just one of the many skills you'll have to master in order to earn your CCNA. Whether it's RIP version 2, OSPF, or EIGRP, the CCNA exam will demand that you can flawlessly configure route... For the CCNA exam, emphasis is put on knowing how to advertise these summary routes in RIPv2 and EIGRP. ... I speak from experience when I tell you that practice makes perfect on the CCNA exam, especially with binary and summarization questions.

Four Important Commands For Your CCNA / CCNP Home Lab by Chris Bryant
More CCNA and CCNP candidates than ever before are putting together their own home practice labs. It's more affordable than it ever has been, and I receive emails daily from new CCNAs and CCNPs who say it's the best thing they could have done to improve their studies. ... If you have an access server, I highly recommend you configure this command on your lines, as shown here: ACCESS_SERVER(con)#line 1 8 ACCESS_SERVER(con)#no exec From your CCNA studies, you know that the command "no ip domain-lookup" prevents a Cisco router from sending a broadcast to find a DNS server anytime you enter...

The Brief History of Cisco Certifications by Natalie Aranda
Even young people can remember the old days when network administrators were more often associated for being the person sitting next to a computer system rather than for specific abilities of proficiency. In those early days, CCNA Certification or CCNA training were concepts totally ignored by... CCNA training consisted of torturous lab practical, needing multiple attempts at the exam, in order to pass. ... CCNA Certification can be acquired applying for a CCNA course designed for those who want to be identified as Cisco-knowledgeable technicians to improve their opportunities to develop...

Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: ISDN Details You Must Know by Chris Bryant
CCNA exam success depends partially on knowing the details of ISDN, and there are plenty of them! To help you review for your CCNA exam, here are a few ISDN details that you must know on exam day. (They help in the real world, too – and there are still plenty of ISDN networks out there! ... Load threshold to place another call Success on the CCNA exam depends on knowing the details. ... (Even IOS Help isn’t totally clear on this.) R2(config)#int bri0 R2(config-if)#dialer-group 1 R2(config-if)#dialer idle-timeout ?

Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Keep Your Most Important Appointment by Chris Bryant
Imagine this. You have an appointment with a client to work on a server or router install. A few minutes before you're scheduled to be there, you decide there's something really good on TV you'd like to watch. Or you decide to go to the gym, or play a game, or do anything else except go see the... Now, what's this got to do with you becoming a CCNA or CCNP? ... Schedule your CCNA / CCNP study time, and keep that appointment as you would with a client. ... Believe it or not, the world can survive with being in contact with you for an hour or so!

Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: The Config Register And Password Recovery by Chris Bryant
Whether you're preparing for the CCNA certification exam or not, you must be prepared for the following question: "Hey, I reloaded this router and it wants an enable password. Do you know it?" Because if you don't, and there's no one available who does, you need to perform a password recovery... Success on the CCNA exam and in working with real-world networks is all about the details, and this is a very important detail. ... Knowing how to recover from a lost password is a vital skill for both the Cisco CCNA certification exam and for success in real-world networks.

Passing Cisco's CCNA and CCNP Exams: The 'VLAN.DAT' File by Chris Bryant
CCNA and CCNP candidates who have their own Cisco home labs often email me about an odd situation that occurs when they erase a switch's configuration. Their startup configuration is gone, as they expect, but the VLAN and VTP information is still there! ... Repetition is the mother of skill, and by truly erasing your VLAN and VTP information by deleting the vlan.dat file from Flash, you'll be building your Cisco skills to the point where your CCNA and CCNP exam success is a certainty. ... [confirm] Switch# The best way to prepare for CCNA and CCNP exam success is by working on real Cisco...

Cisco CCNA Certification: Cisco Switching Modes by Chris Bryant
To pass the CCNA exam and earn that coveted certification, you've got to know Cisco switches inside and out. Among the many important details you've got to know are the three methods that Cisco switches use to forward frames, and the differences between the three. ... Keeping these three switching schemes straight is vital to your CCNA exam efforts, and it will help you in working with Cisco switches in the real world as well. ... The middle ground between these two extremes is Fragment-Free, so named since fragmented frames will not be forwarded.

Cisco Certification: Five Things To Do DURING Your CCNA Exam by Chris Bryant
There are plenty of articles out there about how to prepare for the CCNA exam. However, there are also things you can do to increase your chances of success on exam day during the most important part of the entire process -- the time that you're actually taking the test. ... By this point in the exam, candidates tend to be a little mentally tired. ... Ten questions from the end of your exam, take a 15-to-30 second break. ... Some testing centers have gotten into the habit of handing exam candidates a board that allegedly wipes clean, along with a marker that may or not be fine-pointed.